This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: AP
July 3, 2007
Chinese researchers say they have found a strange pyramid-shaped chamber while surveying the massive underground tomb of China's first emperor and theorize it was built as a passageway for his soul.
Remote sensing equipment has revealed what appears to be a 100-foot-high room above Emperor Qin Shihuang's tomb near the ancient capital of Xi'an in Shaanxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.
Source: AP
July 7, 2007
On April 12, 1945, Lt. Shinichi Uchida faced a terrifying mission — crash his plane into a U.S. warship. But the young kamikaze's final letter to his grandparents was full of bravado.
"Now I'll go and get rid of those devils," the 18-year-old wrote shortly before his final flight, vowing to "bring back the neck" of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He never returned.
For many, such words are redolent of the militarism that drove Japan to ruin in World
Source: AP
July 5, 2007
German court ruled Thursday that a 86-year-old former Nazi convicted of murdering three people during World War II will not serve out a 1949 sentence of life in prison handed down by a Dutch tribunal....
In February, a lower court in Aachen ruled the man, who now lives in a nursing home, could be sent to prison to serve out the sentence. The Cologne court's ruling overturns that decision.
Source: NYT
July 8, 2007
Four decades later, many people here still cannot agree on what to call the five nights of gunfire, looting and flames that disemboweled the geographic midsection of this city, leaving 23 people dead, injuring 700, scorching acres of property and causing deep psychic wounds that have yet to fully heal.
To the frightened white residents who later abandoned Newark by the tens of thousands, it was a riot; for the black activists who gained a toehold in City Hall in the years that follo
Source: NYT
July 8, 2007
As the Statue of Liberty lurched into sight, Malvina Parnes felt a knot rise in her throat.
It was Aug. 19, 1940, and she was 11, her skinny legs rooted to the heaving deck of the Quanza, a Portuguese cargo ship that 317 passengers had chartered to flee war-torn Europe....
Once in the United States, the Quanza’s refugees scattered wide, though many ended up in New York. But even though they made the life-saving voyage together, few kept in contact.
“We were
Source: NYT
July 8, 2007
Until he commuted the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. on Monday, President Bush had said almost nothing about his philosophy in granting clemency while at the White House.
As governor of Texas, though, Mr. Bush discussed and applied a consistent and narrow standard when deciding whether to issue pardons and commutations. And that standard appears to be at odds with his decision in the Libby case.
Mr. Bush explained his clemency philosophy in Texas in his
Source: PakTribune
July 7, 2007
The Ministry of Defence has sold off historic barracks and land worth more than £2.2 billion to fund the spiralling cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Figures show ministers have met about half the cost of the conflicts by selling armed forces assets, including accommodation, airstrips, sports fields, military hospitals and firing ranges.
The true cost of the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan has never officially
Source: LAT
July 8, 2007
The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.
Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit acc
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 27, 2007
Schools are perpetuating damaging stereotypes of Germans because of their "obsession" with Hitler and the Second World War, it was claimed yesterday.
The vast numbers of pupils who choose to study the Nazi period in history is fuelling anti-German feeling, the Church of England said.
This undercurrent is reinforced by the large number of war films shown on television and the "drip feed" of anti-German comments in the media, a report said.
Source: BBC
July 5, 2007
The burial of a British soldier 90 years after his death reminds us that World War I remains are still being found, although few are identified, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams.
"The earth of the Somme and Ypres gives up its dead reluctantly, but every year bones are uncovered by farmers or builders going about their work.
Private Lancaster with son Richard, who later fought in World War II
It is a rare event when the remains can be identified, e
Source: BBC
July 6, 2007
It happened a century ago, but has all the ingredients of a modern detective thriller, theft, dishonour and rumours of sexual indiscretion.
On 6 July 1907, the Irish 'crown jewels' were discovered to have been stolen from Dublin Castle.
The jewels were the insignia of the Illustrious Order of St Patrick, instituted in 1783 as the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Garter.
Normally kept in a bank vault, they had been moved in 1903 to Dublin Castle, the cen
Source: http://cnews.canoe.ca
July 3, 2007
A Finnish-Swedish research team has discovered a Soviet submarine at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
The submarine, identified as SC305, was sunk in 1942 by the Finnish navy during a Second World War battle. Research team spokesman Bjorn Rosenlof says the eight-member team, using sonar equipment, found the vessel at a depth of 136 metres between the Swedish east coast town of Grisslehamn and the Finnish Aland Islands.
Rosenloft said the sub is "in very good condition
Source: The Age
July 4, 2007
ACCORDING to popular belief, Nazi-era Germans flooded opera houses to be enthralled by Rhinemaidens and Valkyries.
But Richard Wagner, far from being the Third Reich's "house composer", actually became much less popular during Adolf Hitler's rule, according to new research.
Germans were much more keen on Carmen, Bizet's tale of a soldier's scandalous obsession with a Gypsy, and on Madama Butterfly, Puccini's opera about an officer's doomed liaison with a Japan
Source: Bloomberg
July 6, 2007
New York art
dealer Ira Spanierman's Raphael painting sold last night for 18.5 million pounds
($37.3 million) with commission, more than 100,000 times the price he paid for it.
The portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici set a record for the
Italian painter at the Christie's International sale in London. Spanierman
bought the work for $325 at a 1968 New York auction when scholars didn't believe
it was by Raphael. Dealers said he tried and failed to sell it himself before
Source: Guardian
July 6, 2007
Choho Zukeran was a schoolboy, mobilised to dig beachfront trenches, when US soldiers landed on his native Okinawa, sparking one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 Japanese and Americans would die, including more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population. Most died in the invasion, others killed themselves - on the orders of the army that was supposed to be protecting them.
"The army had given us two grenades each. They told
Source: Australian
July 7, 2007
PUBLISHERS in the 1980s and 1990s sanitised Aboriginal history by censoring accounts of violence, including sexual abuse and infanticide.
Award-winning historical author Susanna de Vries has revealed that her books on early colonial life, based on the memoirs of pioneer women, were allegedly toned down so as not to upset Aboriginal sensibilities.
De Vries said the memoirs of one woman, Louisa Meredith, were allegedly censored by Queensland publishing house Michael White
Source: National Security Archive
July 1, 2007
As a growing number of Colombian government
officials are investigated for ties to illegal paramilitary terrorists, a
1979 report from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá raises new questions about the
paramilitary past of the current army commander, Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe.The declassified cable, the focus of a new article being published today on the Web site of Colombia's Semana magazine, answers long-simmering questions about a shadowy Colombian terror ogran
Source: AP
July 5, 2007
Recalling his military past may be key to John McCain's political future.
Declining in the polls and struggling with fundraising, the Republican presidential candidate draws an appreciative response from audiences when he recounts his Navy pilot days and the fortitude of some of his fellow POWs during the 6 1/2 years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison.
Vietnam is hardly the centerpiece of McCain's campaign; it's part of his biography and, as such, is an element in a
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
July 6, 2007
THE US President, George Bush, has compared the war in Iraq with the US war for independence in his Fourth of July speech.
Like the revolutionaries who "dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty", Mr Bush said American soldiers were fighting "a new and unprecedented war" to protect US freedom.
In a reprise of speeches he delivered in the congressional campaign last year, Mr Bush said the threat that emerged on Septembe
Source: Times (UK)
July 5, 2007
As if raising and waving millions of Stars and Stripes was not patriotic enough at Independence Day celebrations yesterday, the flags now have to be made in the US.
The state of Minnesota has taken the most draconian action, requiring all US flags sold in the state to be of American manufacture. Violations of the law, which comes into force at the end of the year, will be punished by a $1,000 (£495) fine or 90 days in jail.
From this month, schools and colleges in Arizo
